KurzweilAI.net (10/07/13)Scientists from 135 institutions who are working on the Human Brain Project are meeting this week at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, as the project officially launches. The European Union-funded effort is the largest neuroscience project to date, aiming to enable a complete understanding of the human brain. Initially, the project will develop six research platforms, each with its own technological tools and methods, including neuroinformatics, brain simulation, high-performance computing, medical informatics, neuromorphic computing, and neurorobotics. The platforms will launch in 2016, offering Human Brain Project scientists and worldwide researchers simulations and other resources on a competitive basis. The neuroinformatics platform will obtain data from scientific articles and integrate it into a cartography spanning all of the organizational levels of the brain. In turn, this data will be used to create the brain simulation platform. The high-performance computing platform will have the computational power to use the new information. The medical informatics platform will initially focus on gathering patient clinical data from hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, to help doctors develop the best possible methods for diagnosing neurological disease. Meanwhile, the neuromorphic computing platform aims to develop neuro-technologies such as microchips that mimic the functioning of neural networks, and the neurorobotics platform will integrate neural network simulations into robots. The platforms will exchange information to create a global, cohesive project.Full Article